Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Bing search service rose from
14.1 percent to 14.4 percent. Without a full percentage point change here, it's
fair to rate Bing's growth as flat, too.
ComScore said Google took 10.9 billion of the 16.7
billion explicit core searches, or those that exclude slideshows and contextual
links in text, lodged in June. Yahoo followed with 2.7 billion queries, and
Microsoft notched 2.4 billion searches.
Jefferies & Company analyst Youssef Squali said explicit
core searches were up 8.8 percent year-over-year for the second quarter, thanks
to boosts in Google's and Bing's explicit core search query volume.
However, Google's query volume dragged to 6.4 percent year-over-year
growth compared with 9.8 percent for May and 6.5 percent through April.
For Q2 2011, Google grew queries only 7.5 percent, a
quarter-over-quarter slowdown from the 9.7 percent the search giant tallied in
the first quarter.
Perhaps a little surprising about Google's lack of growth in June is that Google had a busy month for search. The company launched Google voice and image search on the desktop, as well as Instant
Pages to speed up results rendering to the company's 1 billion-plus search
users.
When Google first launched Google Instant in September 2010, it quickly saw query growth and search gains in the following months, but that wore off.
What will be interesting to watch going forward is whether the new Google+ social network
boosts searches through July and beyond.
Google+ is in limited beta now, but appears to have millions of users engaging on the site, which includes Circles social provisioning, Sparks news topics and Hangouts for group video chat.
On the downside, Google is facing serious regulatory
pressure in the U.S., with the Federal Trade Commission launching a broad antitrust inquiry into the company's
search practices, mirroring a European Commission.
The Justice Department is
also mulling whether or not the company's $400 million play for AdMeld is good
for competition.
Google will report Q2 earnings after the bell July 14. Investors polled by Thomson Reuters expect the search engine to report net revenue of $6.54 billion, up 28 percent from the prior year.